Coming Home to Mississippi

Charline R. McCord

Publication Year: 2013

In this collection, essayists examine their lives, their memories of Mississippi, the reasons they left the state, and what drew them back. They talk about how life differs and wears on you in the far-flung parts of our nation, and the qualities that make Mississippi unique.

The writers from all corners of the state are as diverse as the regions from which they come. They are of different races, different life experiences, different talents, and different temperaments. Yet in acceding to the magical lure of Mississippi they are in many ways alike. Their roots are deep in the rich soil of this state, and they come from strong families that valued education and promoted an indomitable optimism. Successes stem from a passion, usually emerging early in life, that burns within them. But that passion is tempered, disciplined, encouraged, and influenced by the people around them, as well as the landscape and the history of their times. These essays give us a glimpse of the people and places that nurtured the young lives of the essayists and offered the values that directed them as they sought their dreams elsewhere. Often they found that opportunity was within their grasp in their home state and came back to realize their full potential. They came back, in some cases, to retire to a familiar place of pleasant memories, to family and to friends. They all have a love and respect for Mississippi and continue, back home, to use their talents to help make the state an even better place to live.

Cover

Contents

Introduction

Coming Home to Mississippi is the companion to our earlier collection Growing Up in Mississippi. Growing Up aspires to tell the reader what makes a Mississippian, to somehow explain the influences within the state that propel our citizens of the world to accomplish so much. Coming Home examines Mississippians’ comings and goings—why ...

William Dunlap

We expatriate Mississippians carry with us a burden of history
and memory that would be far harder to bear were there not so
many of us out there that the mathematical probability of our
running into one another, anywhere on the planet, remains extremely
high.
In 1996 I was in Hanoi working...

Morgan Freeman

I grew up in a segregated society, but I never gave it much thought
until I was older. That was just the way life was for us at the time.
Most of my friends and family were never concerned about why we
had to sit in the balcony of the Paramount Theater; we simply wanted
to see the movies. It was obvious blacks attended separate schools, but
our parents were just as concerned...

Norma Watkins

For me, coming home to Mississippi was never easy. “You were notorious,”
my cousin Thomas Naylor said. If you flee the place where
you were born, leaving a husband and four children behind, you are
notorious, no matter how good your reasons for going might be. I left
to escape bigotry and to go to graduate school, but I drove off with a
civil rights lawyer and my departure was...

William Jeanes

You should know that I am living in Mississippi because of a series
of accidents and happenstance. My entire life has been guided by
accidents and happenstance, so this does not feel unusual to me.
But it’s only fair to say that I am not here altogether by choice.
Beginning in 1960, I left Mississippi three times and came back
three times. Whether that makes me fortunate or qualifies me as a
slow learner, I’m not sure. But I’m...

Willie Morris

My people settled and founded Mississippi—warriors and politicians
and editors—and I was born and raised into it, growing up
in a town, half delta and half hills, before the television culture
and the new Dixie suburbia, absorbing mindlessly the brooding physical
beauty of the land, going straight through all of school with the
same white boys and girls. We were...

Cynthia Walker

This is the first line of a poem I wrote in 1979 as my flight to New
York ascended into the autumn sky over New Orleans. The poem goes
on to talk about the pets buried in Mamaw’s backyard on 8th Avenue
in Laurel, Mississippi, and how I can still remember...

Michael Farris Smith

A couple of weeks ago I was preparing to travel to Paris for about
a week. As I walked into our living room my wife was sitting on
the love seat. Spread across her lap and falling to the floor was our
favorite family blanket. Like many things put to good use, the blanket
has come unraveled over time, the patchwork splitting and small white
bits of padding hanging out of...

Wyatt Cooper

...We recognize the truth of it because each of us has at one time or
another undertaken that almost mythical journey back to the familiar
landscape that used to be home, to confront, instead, a land that is
foreign and unfamiliar. That this is so is, of course, not the fault of the
place. A place, after all...

Judy H. Tucker

When I told my father I was getting married, he said to me, “Well,
if you marry an engineer, you’ll always be moving. They follow
the work.” Daddy was right. I relished the idea of new places
but I wasn’t giving up my home. From the earliest days of our state
when the Choctaws were resettled to the Oklahoma Territory, my father’s
family has lived on the same...

Scott Stricklin

Like many Mississippians, I was born with a love of sports. Neither
of my parents was passionate about sports, though my mother displayed
a passing interest. But my older brother and I were always
playing, watching, or talking about games.
Neighborhood football games often took place in our wide front
yard. Since most of the players were closer to my brother’s age—he
is five years older—the games...

Carolyn Haines

Home is such a powerful concept, especially for a writer. In a world
where many people have come to view their “homes” as investments—
a thing to be sold for a profit, some temporary place like a Motel 6—I
am a homebody. My home is my refuge and my castle, though it is
most ordinary to the gaze of others.
Most of my days...

David Sheffield

It was Africa hot in Jones County, Mississippi, the day the moving
van rolled in from Los Angeles. Heat shimmered above the blacktop
road, coaxing up little tar bubbles that crackled and popped under
the wheels of the truck.
The driver, who had packed up our house in the Hollywood Hills,
climbed down from the cab, took a look around at the weedy yard and
rusting tin roof of our temporary...

Ronnie Riggs

Early morning Mississippi sun sparkled down through branches
covering the road ahead and I drove slowly, struggling to find a
cemetery where there appeared to be none. I’d driven a thousand
miles from my home in Maryland down to Mississippi, my birthplace,
hoping to uncover a significant new layer of my family history. It seems
no matter how far we roam...

Charline R. McCord

I was tricked into leaving Mississippi, and it was a very clever trick
that no twelve-year-old would’ve ever seen coming. I owned a town
at the time and the trick took that town away from me, or me from
it. I had never had the first thought of leaving home, unlike my older
brother, the trickster, who once ran away from home with a friend and
spent a whole night sleeping...

Barry Hannah

Barry Hannah was born in Meridian and grew up in Clinton. He earned a bachelor of arts from Mississippi College and a master of arts and master of fine arts in creative writing from the University of Arkansas. Hannah taught creative writing at numerous colleges and universities and was writer-in-residence at the University of Mississippi at the time ...

Jesmyn Ward

When my parents were young adults, they decided to return to
Mississippi, where they were both from, with their two young
children: my brother and me. They decided that a life in Mississippi
was what they wanted, and they wanted to raise their children
in the South. I was actually born in Berkeley, California, and when we
moved home, I was three....

Dolphus Weary

Dolphus Weary, August 7, 1946. The midwife couldn’t spell very well,
and she never was sure of the date. But she did a fine job helping
my mother bring me into the world.
I was born in a run-down house somewhere near the one-store
hamlet of Sandy Hook, Mississippi, not far from the Louisiana border.
When I was two, our family moved back to my mother’s birthplace
near D’Lo about thirty miles...

Alice Jackson

Katrina, a nasty divorce, and the need for a job pushed me out of
Mississippi years after I adopted it as my home. The divorce, like
the marriage, isn’t worth discussing. I survived it. Enough said.
Still, I do wish the divorce hadn’t occurred during the same time I
lost my beachfront home...

Kevin Bullard

It was 1983. I had just finished my first semester at the University of
Southern Mississippi and was trying to figure out how to pay for
my second. Though I didn’t know anybody in the National Guard,
when I drove past the armory in Magee, my hometown at the time, the
idea struck me that they could somehow help me pay for school. Nowhere
in my eighteen...

Curtis Wilkie

Home is not just where the heart is; it’s the place where we feel most
comfortable.
In a lifetime filled with many moves and much upheaval, I spent
years in four different cities that I loved: Washington, Boston, Jerusalem,
and New Orleans. Though I called each place “home,” at one
time or another, I had a nagging sense that I never quite fit in any of
them. I lacked childhood memories...

Tricia Walker

As I write this, I am riding north on the City of New Orleans train
headed back to the Mississippi Delta. The gentle rhythm of the
rails as we move along evokes an early comfortable memory of
traveling which foreshadowed much of my professional life. And now,
it seems, the roads I’ve traveled have come full circle to bring me home
to Mississippi.
I was raised in Jefferson County, just north of the county seat of
Fayette, in an antebellum...

Sela Ward

They say that once you marry and start a family, you start to return
to your own childhood, consciously or not. And that’s what
happened for me, in a big way. Our wedding was in May, and by
December we’d already begun digging our toes back into the southern
soil.
That first summer as husband and wife, Howard and I were still
living la vida loca, traveling...

Russell Knight

I left Mississippi in a hurry and I didn’t look back—for almost thirty
years, that is. I grew up in Jackson, and had a strong family at home.
My mother was head nurse of the emergency room at University
Hospital and my dad worked for Allstate Insurance. He was an awesome
piano player and had his own band. I was taught at the early age
of eleven how to work for...

Marco St. John

My mother was a Mississippi girl born and bred in the small coastal
town of Ocean Springs. My dad came to New Orleans from
Guatemala. They met over in Ocean Springs and moved to New
Orleans shortly after they married. When they divorced some fourteen
years later, Mom came back to Ocean Springs while my dad went to
New York City. The coast was...

J. Dale Thorn

Life’s mystique takes us down transformative trails, with memories
that leave us to wonder. In my teens, although I loved Louisiana, I
learned to be thankful for my native Mississippi and the redemption
it offered an ancestor. My great-grandfather Jesse’s relocation to
Mississippi was the stuff of legend. His nineteenth-century ride from
Smith County, Texas, to...

Jo McDivitt

I returned to the gardens of my childhood after leaving footprints all
over the world for over thirty-seven years.
I lived in New York City while roaming Marrakech, Paris, Rome,
Bangkok, Florence, Lisbon, and other ports, looking hither and yon for
the brass ring, a silver platter, a perfect sunset, and the indescribable
balm that gives a free spirit a sense...

Sam Haskell

When Judy Garland’s character, Dorothy Gale, exclaimed, “There’s
no place like home!” in the classic MGM feature film The Wizard
of Oz, it made adults and children alike think of home and
count their blessings from coast to coast, and eventually throughout
the entire world. The year was 1939, and in a year some claim to be the
finest year in motion picture...

Johnnie Mae Maberry

Deddy’s (we never said Daddy) favorite saying was, “We will cross that
bridge when we come to it.” My deddy, Major Maberry, crossed the
bridge into restful sleep at the youthful age of fifty-seven. During
Deddy’s short illness, I was living in Joliet, Illinois, which had been
my home away from my Mississippi home for nearly twelve years. The
year was 1983 and twelve years...

Keith Thibodeaux

My earliest memories involve listening to music and keeping time
by beating on pots and pans with sticks, knives, and forks. I liked
to strike up a beat on the garbage cans outside the kitchen door
of our house in Lafayette, Louisiana. With the sounds of Benny Goodman,
Count Basie, and Duke Ellington filling our house, I quickly developed
a sense of rhythm...

Maureen Ryan

Lucinda Williams and Amos Lee toured together in the summer
of 2011. Gravelly voiced folk-rock-blues singer Lucinda Williams,
a true southern girl who has lived in Louisiana, Mississippi, and
Tennessee, has been kicking around a while, singing blues and betrayal
and bayous. But the very talented Amos Lee is a relative newcomer,
a Philadelphia native who...

Mary Donnelly Haskell

When people ask me where I’m from, I usually answer: “I was
born and raised in Beaumont, Texas, but my mother’s people
are from Alabama, so I spent a great deal of time there growing
up—but I’m from Mississippi.”
In 1976, following in the steps of my older sister, Pride (who was at
Ole Miss in the late sixties...

Bob Allan Dunaway

When I was eleven years old, I became unhappy over something
and decided I would leave home. I packed a small cardboard
suitcase with a few clothes and comic books and hitchhiked
about forty miles to my daddy’s home. I felt sure he and my stepmother
would take me in and solve all my problems. There I had no
supervision and could do...

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.

I am an outsider/insider Mississippian, the subject of other people’s
observations and the object of my reflections. Born in Washington,
D.C., in 1943, I was repatriated in the late fall of 1949 to Moss Point,
my father’s hometown. My six-year-old self changed rapidly from being
happy, carefree, and urban to being town-trapped, sullen, and confused.
I could not understand...

Mary Ann Mobley

I just can’t do it—Lord knows I’ve tried! I’ve tried so many times and
it just never seems to come out right no matter how hard I try or
how long I anguish over it! I simply can’t seem to put my feelings of
home and Mississippi to paper. When you feel something so intensely,
you want to write it down—if anguish to stanch the bleeding, if love or
happiness to prolong the...

Acknowledgments

The editors are deeply indebted to each of the writers represented in this collection who responded promptly to our various requests for memories, bios, and photographs. We understand all too well that they had to make time in their packed schedules to pause and reflect, pull and reassemble the past, shape into words and share on paper their ...

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